PRESENTATION:Theodoulos Gregoriou, Mental Geography-Constellations

In his work the Chypriot artist Theodoulos Gregoriou often uses geometrical shapes such as spheres, cones and cubes, on which he projects images, sometimes the artist includes colored minerals from Cyprus. His use of purely geometrical forms (sphere, cone, cube) which are both neutral and universal, allows him to blur the limits between the material and immaterial.

Photo: Theodoulos Gregoriou Archive

​​The exhibition “Mental Geography: Constellations” is Theodoulos Gregoriou’s first presentation in Romania, representing a return to some of the most important places in his biography: from the copper mines that populated his childhood to Bucharest, where he studied painting at the Institute of Fine Arts “N. Grigorescu” at the end of the 1970s. The site-specific installation that gives the exhibition its title is a continuation of the artist’s preoccupations, who practices a certain type of personal land art—in which, instead of intervening in nature, the landscape is retrieved from the artist’s memory and transposed into the exhibition space in a metaphorical form, reduced to its essence. As the title suggests, Theodoulos Gregoriou sets off on a mental journey in this exhibition, through places and times both from his own past and from the past of humanity, in which he pursues the continuity of concepts beyond the continuous transformations of matter. Looking back at the different layers of his artistic research (which was presented at the Venice Biennale in 1997, the Louvre Museum in 2008-2009 or the 2016 intervention at the Place du Louvre, to name but a few), Theodoulos’ work on the National Museum of Contemporary (MNAC) has a retrospective character that is enhanced by the continued relevance of its approach to today. It is not only a very dense presentation of an artist’s practice, but also an opportunity to highlight the sometimes-hidden connections of a wider, shared cultural space of international importance. Mirroring layers of memory and history, his installation addresses questions of a universal heritage and its survival through memory and visuals emerging from an increasingly image-centric culture, in an era defined by multiple crises – and the answer it is formed through a specific poetic and symbolic need to transform the collective and existential questions of man into a visual language. It juxtaposes primitives with electronic media, materials and structures with historical origins but also immaterial elements capable of transforming and giving a new meaning to primary materials and media.

Photo: Theodoulos Gregoriou, Mental Geography – Constellations (detail), 2023, Wood frame, Plastic foil, Colored Water, 2 red led strips, cement heads- (archaeological elements reproduction), copper plating roods, © & Courtesy the artist

Info: Curators: Alexandru Oberländer-Târnoveanu & Catherine Louis Nikita, MNAC Bucharest-Palace of Parliament, Izvor 2-4 St., Wing E4, Bucharest, Romania, Duration: 25/05-01/10/2023, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 11:00-19:00, https://www.mnac.ro/home